The long nose sniffs street
Fire iron acrid smoke
Rubber ash cobbled dust
Wire bit and loose skin
Colour in the scent mist:
Fleck of meat from breakfast plate
Wets its lip licks its long fur
Switches its bristling timer
And bides and bides
Dappled shadow of poplar
Draws across it; a sundial
Still biding, morsel unmoving
Then, move; it jets, water
From a turned tap bursts
Onto the pavement angling
At neckbreaking turn and cut
Across a labyrinth of shoe
Is leaped, is kicked, still spurts
Toward its fleshy prize
Pounces, jaws clamp and lock
The voyage remade
Against the storm of leather waves
Its black beaded eye, a compass
Darting between sequential stomp
Loot dropped squandered trampled
Tiny violence of a scream
Trapped in a small lung's squeak
The red burn of pinioned tail
Sinks in the long tooth, flurries claws
But does not pierce the patent hide
Prize reclamped, reclaimed
And so on, harried now
In paw and scurried vault
The pant into darkness dived
Licking the wound from trailing vein
Bruised, bloody but unbroken
With lonely triumph it chews;
The greatest trophies have their use
